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Indispensability and Article 102 TFEU: it is not about Bronner (and refusals), but about Van den Bergh Foods (and remedies)

By  |  March 30, 2020

By Pablo Ibañez Colomo, Chilling Competition

As you know, the hearing in the Google Shopping case took place last month – speaking of which: huge thanks to Lewis Crofts for his quasi-live tweeting of what was going on (all that follows is what I gathered from his reporting).

The question of the applicable legal test was always going to be central in Google Shopping. Lewis’s tweets confirm this view. A lot of time was spent, it seems, on whether the Commission should have established that non-discriminatory display on the Google platform was indispensable within the meaning of Bronner (and, I would presume, IMS Health, which provides the most precise definition of the concept in the case law).

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